In traditional telecommunications, a user relies on contact management applications on his or her devices to store numbers of known contacts and directory services online or elsewhere to provide numbers for others.
There are a number of difficulties with this paradigm. Telephone numbers (particularly mobile telephone numbers) often change, rendering contact databases out of date, and there is generally no consistent way for such contact databases to be updated. Direction of calls within an organisation is often problematic, particularly for callers from outside an organisation. Such callers are typically routed through interactive voice menus—these increase call time and cost and are unpopular with callers. The lack of standard messaging clients means that interaction between employees of one company and another may be problematic.
Methods to establish voice calls between users have developed beyond traditional wired and wireless circuit-switched network telephony. Voice calls are increasingly made over any available internet protocol network (such as the Internet) using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). A new approach to establishing voice calls between browsers is WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication)—this is an API definition drafted by W3C to support browser-to-browser applications for voice calling and other user to user communications. This approach allows for direct calling between users within browser-based applications. Further details of WebRTC may be found at http://www.webrtc.org/.
It would be desirable to improve upon the conventional contact management and directory approaches to enable calls to be routed more effectively where direct contact information is either unavailable or likely to be out of date.